supplicium post mortem

Recently I had the opportunity to inspect a friend’s toy collection, cleverly hidden inside a hockey bag. She had some particularly appealing straps, which I found myself wanting to try out on Marky. She also had several nice canes. (If my friend is reading this now, she will probably be shouting that the word nice should never share a sentence with the word cane.) Even more surprising than the desire to whack Marky was the discovery that after more than two years, my eye was still “in.” I discovered this when I arranged some patio chair cushions over the back of my friend’s sofa in preparation for demonstrating the art of caning.

Back in the day (e.g. when M was alive and I actually topped from time to time), I was the inferior top. He had better aim, better everything. I was a pretty shabby top altogether, I always believed. Now I think my insecurity wasn’t entirely accurate. When I took my friend’s canes and applied them to the misbehaving cushions, I found my aim good, my wrist snappy. My friend seemed to think I was hitting hard—and it was only 50% or so. I started to think maybe my topping experience hasn’t been normal, only having topped one person, a boy who liked to take a lot and hard.

Now, back in my own home, I have begun to wonder if I actually possess implements any more. I think they must have disintegrated in the closet, or got lot permanently wherever I put them away that I can’t now remember, like my work SIM card, or my husband.

A few days before encountering my friend’s hockey bag, another friend showed me her flogger. It was purple and brown and beautifully crafted. She let me touch it, and it seemed like it could be soothing and massage-y.

“Do you want to try it?” Friend Two asked casually.

I froze with a polite smile on my face: “I don’t know!” Friend Two didn’t push it; she just set the flogger down on the picnic bench where we were sitting. I remarked that if she’d told me it was a massager, I’d be all over it, but the word flogger was too scary.

But scary how? Certainly I wasn’t afraid it would hurt. I was afraid, on some paralyzed emotional level, to have anything to do with an object labeled Flogger. To use a flogger on myself , or to let someone else use it on me, felt at that moment like it would be crossing an invisible yet indelible boundary. It would mean engaging with kink on a level beyond the verbal. It would be in a way like a first kiss—the first kiss in this life after M.

My real first kiss (excluding stage kisses) came very late, at age 20, and by that time kissing had become a barbed, electrified barrier. I’m not sure I remember my first kiss with M. (Insane!) I remember the hug when we met for the first time, on top of the Empire State Building, and I remember the heavy make-out session on my futon, the first time anyone had touched me in a few places, and how hugely, overpoweringly exciting it was, like nothing I’d ever imagined.

But as for the flogger offered to me casually as a mere sensation experiment, I must have frozen because I was afraid to cross any physical barrier into anything that smelt even vaguely like kink. (How I hate that word, but when I use my word, tgi, people always ask me what it means, so I come off as elitist, speaking a dead, obscure code. But I miss that word. Lots! Come back to me!!) To have played with the flogger, even lightly in fun, would have been to step off of the sidelines and into the play. I wonder if on some level I was thinking, or Casey was thinking: If I do that, then people will start misconstruing my conversation and think I want to be whacked, and I don’t. Just like Casey was saying (it must have been her even though I didn’t know her name yet) before that first kiss at age 20: If you kiss a boy, it means you want to have sex with him.

I was terrified to kiss that first boy, but after two nights of faffing about (and confirming with my promiscuous roommate that kissing did not equal consent to intercourse), I finally kissed him. It felt strange, but not bad. His mouth tasted of popcorn, which he had been eating. He was a freshman and I was a junior, which was seriously robbing the cradle. I remember that night he asked me what I wanted. I was still adjusting to having crossed the first kiss frontier, though I didn’t tell him that. He said he wanted a Relationship, and asked if I did, too. I said I’d like to get to know him a little first. We dozed off, fully clothed, in my narrow university bed. A couple of days later, I heard in the dining hall that he’d started dating someone else. I was blindsided, embarrassed, crushed… Still, it was a good first kiss. I wasn’t in love with him.

Besides first-kiss boy and M, I think I’ve only kissed two other boys. I am 41 years old, and I know this is not normal. My sister makes out on almost every date. Even if she’s bored with the guy, she’ll make out with him to see if he gets more interesting. I haven’t kissed anyone except family, on the cheek, since I kissed M goodbye that morning 26 months ago. It’s not that I’ve resisted; there’s been no opportunity.

by Richard Dadd

Still, if the opportunity to kiss a man ever comes again, I’ll probably be afraid to cross that threshold. I think in person I can come off as very reserved, bordering on cold or conceited; the truth is I’m scared, paralyzed in a way that makes no sense when I explain it. I’m scared of sex, scared of kissing, scared of playing, and apparently even scared of touching a friend’s leather toy if it bears the label flogger.

In the Land of Fairy, you must never eat the food or you’ll have to stay there. If I eat the food in this new world—this hateful world without M—will I have to stay? Of course, this world isn’t like Fairy. We’ve got to stay no matter what, and there’s only one way out—the way he already went.

Louis was a senior when I was a sophomore. His were the first male lips that kissed mine. Ok, it was onstage in Cinderella, but we did have to hold it for twelve bongs of the clock. At the first rehearsal I was so scared that I kept bursting into giggles and flinching away when the kiss came. He tried to put me at ease. His lips were chapped. He never tried to open his mouth. On closing night, I started to like it.

We both skipped lunch every day to do homework in the library. In reality we talked, anything and everything, his navy blue eyes as open as the sea. I wanted to feel those chapped lips again, but he was dating a girl called Koozie. No one understood. He was smarter than anyone in our high-school of 4000. She, apparently, was a ditz. He told me things he’d never told anyone – about his brother’s mental illness, about his longing to live as a monk back in time on Lindisfarne, painting illuminated manuscripts in the scriptorium, the world cut off in a tidal cloister, ocean lapping at the pebbles, chant de-rattling his nerves. I picked at the stitching of my LeSportSac purse and exercised restraint, day after day. He liked me, lots. He could undress before me in that library as with no one. I had the mind and the heart to match him, but Koozie was the girl he wanted to kiss. I was doomed to Just Friends.

Read other folks writing this week:

• Rafi
• Travis King
• PapaTomLA
• Nettagyrl

A stern note: I have noticed that several people [cough, cdm] have grown slothful in their ways and have begun regularly to abuse the deadline for Flash Fiction Friday, as generous as it is. This will never do. Be advised, therefore, that as from next week, late entries for 3f will incur automatic whacking. No exceptions! [cough - casey!]

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

I was looking through the archives, as you do when you wish there was something new to read, and I thought it was probably time to re-post this story. It is the first tgi story I ever wrote, penned before I met M, and before I had ever played. Thus, although I had done plenty of scenes in the theater, I had never done a scene like this, and never felt a whack since childhood. Even though this story is overwritten and naive in many ways, I like it as a portrait of who I was in the summer of 1995, weeks before I met the man who would become my husband. It has all the markers of a new-at-this 26-year-old: the over-intellectualization, the bravado, the over-estimation of how much it might hurt, etc.

Some bio for those who like that kind of thing: I did do summer stock in Boston, and during college I had a roommate with a wild sex life and a predilection for TMI (which at the time I wistfully considered liberated). Andrew is loosely based on a guy I knew in college, but we never roomed together and nothing ever happened between us. In fact, once, just before he graduated, he asked if he could kiss me. I froze in terror because I had never actually kissed anyone [can you believe it??]. “Er, I don’t really do kisses,” I lamely said. He accepted this, sadly. He probably went away thinking I hated him or was a lesbian. LOL! Poor guy!

When I first started emailing with M, there was such an instant connection that I thought we already knew each other. I accused him of being the guy who had inspired Andrew. Not true, of course. But in role-play he wound up sounding a lot like Andrew sounds here.

I started acting at the age of six. I did a lot of directing in college. The acting stuff here is all taken from experience. It was one of the ways I was able to get my head around role-play then, and in retrospect, I find it still true, maybe more true than I knew when I wrote this piece.

A last remark – it’s odd for me to read this story and see “Casey” as this adult character, basically me with a pseudonym, whereas for most of her existence, Casey has been a kid. I suppose that’s because when I wrote this story, she was still evolving.

Equity Day Off

© Casey Morgan 1995

1.

It was ten o’clock at night in early June and the air felt like breath for the first time that year. When you went outside and walked around, it smelled like Florida. I had spent my first Equity day-off getting high with my roommate Judy. We took blankets out to Walden Pond and lay around in the sun from about ten a.m. until three thirty, at which time Judy had gone home and packed for her great-aunt’s funeral. I’d smoked pot before but never got high until that day. I’m not generally into drugs. Maybe I’m a goodie-goodie, but I was always afraid they’d fry my brain cells or make me do something I regret. On this occasion, though, Judy talked me into it.

“You can’t expect me to spend two days in Fairfield County Connecticut and not get stoned first,” she told me. I agreed because I knew going home was horrible for her. Though there might have been something else working in the decision. It was the first summer I’d had an apartment (albeit with my college roommate and her cousin). We were all part of a summer stock company. Judy was the designer, I was a director, and our third roommate, Andrew, was one of the actors. My play was up first, and after a week of eight-hour rehearsals I could barely think. Still, the legitimacy, the sense of adulthood intoxicated me. Maybe that’s why I agreed to get high. I don’t know. The point is I had.

And I was regretting it by ten o’clock. After Walden Pond, I’d gone to Quincy Market and gorged on chocolate ice-cream smush-ins. By the time the pot wore off, my stomach ache had set in. When I got home, Judy had left, and Andrew was nowhere to be found, so I crashed on the couch. When I awoke, I remembered what I’d done. That was when my stomach really started to hurt. I thought the best remedy would be work, so I sat down at my desk and got out my script. The play was Cloud 9, and I had to finish blocking the first act the next day. The harder I concentrated, though, the more I heard in my head awful snatches of my conversation with Judy.

“How was it seeing Klaus again?” I had asked her. Her German boyfriend had just arrived in Boston for a three-week visit, and I knew she’d missed him.

“It was…different,” she said.

“Different?”

“Fantastic, but different.” She took another drag on the joint, and so did I.

“What do you mean?” Judy usually took no prompting to go into the most intimate details of her sex life. She simply refused to be ashamed of anything she did. I admired this and hoped I might someday become as liberated as she was. Today, though, she turned over onto her stomach and squinted at me, as if I’d irritated her.

“You’re a real piece of work,” she told me. “You’ve been listening to me tell about my lovers for two years and you’ve never once told anything in return.”

“There’s nothing to tell. You heard all about my aborted kiss with Justin.” My virginity and pathetic lack of experience was something Judy accepted, even if she did vigorously encourage me to Go For It.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “There’s always something to tell. You must have fantasies.”

“I dream about making out with Hugh Grant, if that’s what you mean.”

“That is not what I mean.” Judy seemed pissed off at me. “You are my best friend, Casey, but I’ve got to say I’m sick and tired of being your tutor or your erotica supplier or your voyeurism satisfier, or whatever it is I am to you!” At first I’d thought she was joking, but now I thought she was weirded out on a combination of pot, funerals, and Klaus, and was taking it out on me.

“I know you’re not as pure and naive as you make yourself out to be,” she said. “It’s not possible. And I take your Nothing To Tell line as an insult to my intelligence. You must have fantasies that are a little bit smutty.”

“Well, sure.”

“So let’s hear one.”

“No way, Judy.”

“What do you mean, no way? Think of all the embarrassing stuff I’ve told you!”

“Look, it’s nothing personal, and I know I shouldn’t be ashamed of fantasies, but I am.” I saw her cock her guns for another attack against Shame. Words came from my chest, not my brain: “I hate myself. As much for the fantasies as for being ashamed of them.”

She shut up. We finished the joint, then went swimming. Afterwards we lit up another (the third, I think), and I asked Judy to reapply the sunscreen to my back. I was wearing a black, one-piece in the style of a 1930′s bathing suit, the kind that fit like Calvin Klein Boxer Briefs. It had a big scoop back. Judy’s hands were always soft and squeezy, and when she rubbed the lotion on my back she also gave me a little massage.

“That’s great,” I said. “A little higher.”

“Casey, I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“Uh-huh.” I felt deliciously relaxed as Judy kneaded my back in the frying sun.

“I hate to think of you hating yourself.”

“I don’t usually,” I said, feeling a little dizzy.

“The thing is, I feel strange talking about what Klaus and I did last night. I mean embarrassed strange.”

“But you’re never embarrassed.” I couldn’t tell if it was the massage or the pot or what, but my body felt heavy and buzzing all over, like I was floating in humming water.

“Well, this particular incident embarrasses me. So here’s what I propose: I’ll tell you what Klaus and I did last night if you tell me your most embarrassing fantasy.”

“Come on Judy, I said I didn’t want to tell.”

“Please, Casey. It would mean a lot to me. See, it’s going to drive me crazy if I can’t talk to someone about last night, but if you don’t tell me something equally embarrassing then I’ll feel gross.”

“Oh I don’t know…” It was all starting to feel really dreamy. She was my best friend. She was genuinely asking for my help. “I’m afraid you’ll hate me, or think I’m sick.”

Judy burst out laughing. “That, I think, is impossible given my experiences. Please, Case. What good is it getting stoned if you don’t tell embarrassing secrets while doing it? Don’t be a Puritan.”

“I’m not a Puritan!” I’m as broad-minded as they come. I was directing Cloud 9!

“Prove it.”

“All right,” I told her. “If you promise not to think less of me.”

“Less of you? The smuttier it is the more highly I’ll think of you.”

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